ISLAMABAD: The Sui Northern Gas Pipelines Limited (SNGPL) and Sui Southern Gas Company (SSGC) have collectively repaired around 887-kilometer faulty pipelines and rectified 1447,342 leakages in line with the government strategy to bring down the Unaccounted for Gas (UFG) ratio.
Besides, the companies’ experts inspected around 13,388 Town Border Stations (TBSs) and rectified 633 stations after finding them leaked.
The state utilities have installed Electronic Volume Corrector (EVC) meters at all industrial connections and high pressure commercial connections that calculate actual volume of gas consumption, maintain record of hourly/daily gas consumption and generate tamper alarm in case of an attempt of magnetic interference with meter or other infrastructure.
Around 1,850 out of 3,655 industrial connections have been integrated with Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) for remote monitoring of industrial consumers for timely identification of gas theft and measurement errors, if any.
To control the line losses and bring down the UFG ratio, the cyber locks are being installed at industrial meter stations to restrict the access of consumers to the meters and regulators to reduce chances of gas theft.
The companies are also using Laser Leak Detectors, the best available technique and gadgets, for identification of underground leakages. “High flow samplers are being used for quantification of leakages.”
The UFG losses of SNGPL and SSGC stood at 8.83 per cent and 15.85 percent respectively during the fiscal year 2020-21.
“Volumetric loss of SNGPL remained at 34,021 million cubic feet (mmcf) of gas and SSGC 67,476 mmcf of gas, mainly because of gas leakages, measurement errors and theft.” In 2019-20, the SNGPL and SSGC had prevented a volumetric loss of around 9,938 mmcf gas against the UFG reduction target of 14,806 mmcf gas.
The UFG is a phenomenon of gas loss that occurred due to various technical factors when gas flowed from fields to end consumers. It is calculated as the difference between metered gas volume injected into the transmission and distribution network (Point of Dispatch/Delivery) and the metered gas delivered to the end consumers (Consumer Meter Station) during a financial year.